Mimi’s Favorite Books, Part 1!
I’ll be back later this week with thoughts on our recent events, but I’d also like to start using this space more informally, as a place to talk about, well, awesome books! So I thought I’d start with one that’s long been a favorite: Brothers Karamazov.
This book has stuck with me over the years. The pity and compassion of Russian writing just always sucker punches me in the ticker. In my opinion this book should be made into a Quentin Tarantino movie if you read it we can discuss our casting choices. The B.K. is about a dysfunctional family (the karamozovs) a family with an excess testosterone resulting in some serious issues. The book is sweeping, sordid, raw, full of humor and emblazoned on every page with juicy tension. Both the narrator and the characters are always groping towards the realization of an ideal of brotherhood/fraternity that can exist in a world full of human weakness and sinfulness. So yeah, It’s an ambitions frickin book to say the least! The fact that there once lived a mad russian genius crazy enough to write this epic makes me feel like a complete wuss for ever being afraid to read it! I was nearly scared away by the difficulty of keeping the characters strait (Russians like long names and nicknames) In retrospect though, the reading part was easy – what’s hard for me to fathom is the mind that created this masterpiece and it’s not just the mind – the heart this excess of insight where the hell did it come from what a marvelous deep deep well! So fall in and keep falling – experience your Karamozovian nature!
“I’m a Karamazov… when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I’m even pleased that I’m falling in such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn. Let me be cursed, let me be base and vile, but let me also kiss the hem of that garment in which my God is clothed; let me be following the devil at the same time, but still I am also your son, Lord, and I love you, and I feel a joy without which the world cannot stand and be.”
